Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Grid Iron - Crude

In an upstairs room in Leith, Grid Iron
theatre company are going for gold. The prize is the Edinburgh-based
company's latest site-specific extravaganza, Crude, a dramatic study
of oil, the slippery substance that powers the world, making some
people very rich. For those on the frontline, the human cost
sometimes proves even greater.

This is easy to see in the mock up of a
hotel bar and bedroom where a one-night tryst between characters
played by Phil McKee and Kirsty Stuart takes place. There are brief
monologues from survivors of oil rig disasters such as the one that
happened in 1988 when an explosion happened on the North Sea based
Piper Alpha rig, which was destroyed in a blast that killed 167
people, including two rescue workers. A memorial to those who died
sits in Hazelhead Park in Aberdeen.

In another scene, McKee's character is
tied to a chair and tortured. Inbetween all this, a man in a stetson
called Texas Jim swaggers about like J.R. Ewing, the slickly devious
oil tycoon played by Larry Hagman in overblown 1980s TV drama,
Dallas. To an outside eye, the scenarios are hard to piece together
at this stage, though they do demonstrate the expansive spread of an
oil industry that is pervades into our everyday lives whether we
realise it or not.

“Oil isn't just about what you put in
the car,” says Grid Iron director Ben Harrison, writer and director
of Crude. “There is oil in everything in this room. It's on the
walls, on the chairs, in pretty much everything you touch and
everything you wear. Oil is everywhere, and if you were an
eco-warrior, the extreme end-point of that would be that you wouldn't
be able to go out. You'd just sit in a room naked.”

This is why in capitalist society oil
has become such a precious commodity, as well as a political
football. This is particular the case in Scotland, where the presence
of North Sea has provided employment for several generations of
riggers. As Harrison found out during extensive research that took I
interviews with riggers as well as dipping into the 700 hours of
archive recordings of oil industry workers held by the University of
Aberdeen, it sometimes comes at a very human cost.

“What is central to the play is the
fact that the men work two weeks on, two weeks off, and what those
work patterns do to families,” Harrison explains. “The oil
industry has the highest divorce rate in the UK of any other
profession or workforce. It's funny, because I assumed the divorce
came when both partners became further and further disconnected from
each other with that working pattern, but the first peak is when they
have kids. It's a great job for a single man, but as soon as you have
a family it can be a disaster. The second peak is when the offshore
workers give up, try and find something else to do, and are under
their partners feet the whole time. Neither side can cope with that.”

Beyond such a localised domestic
fallout, Crude looks to a broader context for the trickle-down
consequences of the oil industry. As Harrison observes, “Scotland's
place in the oil industry is vital, but it was also important that we
moved away from Scotland, because while it's a local story, it's also
a global one.”

To this end, Crude weaves three
narrative strands together, which moves between Scotland, the Arctic
Circle and the Niger Delta, both key players in oil production in a
way that has caused major protests. In the Arctic Circle, it is
estimated that some ninety billion barrels of oil remain
undiscovered, while Greenpeace have launched the Save the Arctic
initiative to highlight the threat the area is under from oil
drilling.

Similarly, some two million barrels of
oil a day are extracted from the Niger Delta, though much of it is
burned or flared, causing local pollution and climate change. The
lack of distribution of oil-based wealth has provoked numerous
environmental movements and inter-ethnic conflicts, including
activity from a guerilla group, the Movement for the Emancipation of
the Niger Delta.

“We go from a very cold place to a
very hot place,” says Harrison, “and the Niger Delta in
particular is very important to the piece, because the whole
coastline has been completely devastated by oil spills.”

In an attempt to knit all this
together, Harrison looked to Short Cuts, Robert Altman's interwoven
big-screen rendering of short stories by Raymond Carver.

“All of the characters are connected
by one degree of separation,” says Harrison, “and thematically
they relate. So there's an Arctic Circle protestor, and a character
in the Niger Delta, who never actually meet in the play, but are
linked thematically. The Texas Jim character frames things as this
timeless character who has lived since the birth of oil in 1859 in
America, though actually oil was discovered by the Greeks two
thousand years ago.

“Then there is a deeply unhappy oil
worker, who is worried about the downturn that is happening, but
finds himself in a position where he has to go and work in the Niger
Delta. The economic downturn in the oil industry is a very real
thing. Aberdeen largely survived the 2008 recession because of the
oil industry, but now finds itself in a place where house prices are
crumbling.”

As a show, Crude is very much getting
back to Grid Iron's roots. It isn't just the one-word title that's on
a par previous shows such as Gargantua and the Edinburgh Airport set
Roam, plus the presence of Harrison at the helm. The location of
Crude in a warehouse owned by Dundee Port Authority??? beside a pair
of static rigs is the company's latest example of aligning
performance to an appropriate space.

In an ideal world, Crude would have
been performed on an actual oil rig, with the audience being
helicoptered out to sea. Even a one-way flight for twelve audience
members, however, would have proved financially prohibitive even for
a company as imaginative as Grid Iron. Add in the fact that no-one is
allowed on a less than spacious oil rig without undergoing a form of
induction at least a month before, and practical logistics too were
against it.

As it is, audiences will still be
required to bring their passports in order to enter the show, which
takes place in Shed 36, an empty warehouse where refitting work on
three oil rigs parked beside it is undertaken in what Harrison calls
“one of the biggest sheds I've ever seen.”

The seeds of Crude date back ten years.

“It was after we did Roam in
Edinburgh Airport,” Harrison remembers, “and we always do an
exercise to try and think of what would be more difficult than the
place we've just done something. Roam was pretty difficult, but we
were walking down Princes Street, and I said, what about an oil rig.
We were never going to get that, but where we're doing the play now I
reckon is the next best thing.”

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, The Quietus, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia and The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) and Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), and co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? and Time Out Edinburgh Guide. Neil has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival and Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on BBC and independent radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, and has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.